One of the greatest feats of engineering in Seattle history was the connecting of Lake Union to the Puget Sound, via the Ballard Locks (http://www.nws.usace.army.mil/). Now a popular tourist destination, and still a working waterway, the Locks, when they were built, were the site of one of the most chilling episodes of all.
To build the Locks, great amounts of earth and stone and rubble had to be dug up and hauled away, leaving a long trough which would eventually be filled with water to allow shipping traffic to travel seamlessly between the two bodies of water, that lie at different levels (and, in the bargain, releasing untold amounts of telluric energies- just saying). In the midst of construction, men from all over the world came to be a part of the project, and after months of work, the trough had been dug. One particular section was narrow and deep, littered at the bottom with sharp boulders and standing water.
Work on the Locks would often go until late in the day, and it was on one spring evening in 1916 that a group of a dozen or so workers was standing along the top edge of south wall of the trough, trying to fasten a large winch to the lip of the wall so that the next day they could being hauling up some of the boulders below. One of the men, putting all of his strength into his work, overdid it and stumbled over the lip of the wall and under the horrified eyes of his workmates, plunged down into the trough, where he crashed against the boulders and slipped limp and broken into the sloshing waters.
The other men were distraught and the foreman told them all leave for the day and advised them all to go have a stiff drink and collect themselves. All that night, the men clung together, mortified by what they had seen and reliving over and over that slow fall of their comrade. The night eventually gave way to the dawn, and the men returned to work. The foreman greeted them all and shook each of their hands and was “very solicitous” to them.
Sullenly, they made their way back to the trough to ready the winch; the unspoken thing was that one of them would have to retrieve the body of their friend from down there. They went about their work, fixated on the details of it to keep the traumatic event from their minds, and one of the men asked for a hand in hauling some cable through an eyelet. Another volunteered, and the cable was sailing through nicely when the man looked up to thank his co-worker, when he saw it was in fact the man who had fallen the day before, looking hale and hearty as he had in the moment before.
The others were amazed and peppered the fallen man with questions he could not answer. He had no recollection of the fall, and as far as he was able to tell them, he had been with them the whole previous night, drinking and carousing as usual. He laughed at the idea that he had fallen, he let the men touch and pinch him and search his clothes for rips and tears. The man was intact. The other men, though, were even more terrified than they had been before.
They brought the fallen man to the foreman, who was likewise incredulous. No one could explain what had happened: the eyes of at least ten men had watched the man fall, and yet here he was amongst them again, alive and well and showing no signs of ill effect.
Several weeks after this incident, the body of the fallen man was found, stabbed to death and hidden in undergrowth not far from the Locks worksite. His assailant was never found, but of the ten men who swore to have seen him fall that day, three committed suicide within five years, one was lost at sea, another was killed in a fight, and two were sent to prison.
Now if that doesn’t make you shout “Uff da!!”, we don’t know what will!